A Poem is a Site of Collecting

Common Objects

language and its publics.

Less Space Gallery, October 2016

information forthcoming

The Poiesis Project

E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore Gallery, 2017

The Poiesis Project is an exhibit of 33 "political posters" that arose in the wake of white supremacist resurgence in Charlottesville, NC and Berkeley, CA during the summer of 2017. The posters seek to challenge the reductive slogans and narratives of internet news and social media storytelling, in an attempt to create space for earnest inquiry and communication. The project features words, ideas, and quotations submitted by Oakland artists, writers, and activists. It was curated and designed by Hannah Rubin and Tara Marsden, with the support of BAMPFA. One thousand six hundred fifty posters were printed, all were given away.

Data Display Site #1

California Institute of the Arts Main Gallery, 2017

Data Display Site #1 is a sound art piece that began in July 2017 while at residency at Dusklit at the Seligman Performing Art Center in upstate New York. It is a work-in-progress that mutates during each iteration — and is a continuing, and evolving, investigation of the relationship between surveillance, consent, and power through the staging of variousanachronistic (& private) interactions in public spaces.

The piece, in its first iteration (in upstate NY), consisted of ademarcated tent space inwhich participants where invited to enter, solong as they followed the contractual rules posted at the entrance:agree to be recorded, agree to remain in the tent for the entireduration of the length of a cassette tape, agree to read the Data Love Notes that were scattered around the tent out loud at some point while in the tent.

In this iteration, as Data Display Site #1, I presented the collected datarecordings for gallery listening as physical objects of vulnerable accumulation — a series of marked cassette tapes. The audio shrine stands next to a framed Data Love Note and the Terms and Conditions that dictated the legal collecting of the presented data.

Poetry in the Dark

is a community sound experience where people gather in the dark to listen. It has happened on:

//language as sound, listening. a flickeringly sonic experience of fantasy and imagination. of slowness. a language to live in together with the lights turned off: feeling its weight with skin, lips, tongue. no need, for eyes.//

Deluge of the Real

The Hole, Oakland, CA

February 20, 2017 marked our first president's day with Donald Trump as president. Trump’s rise to power, during the 2016 election, relied upon a crafty manipulation of language that caused his sensationalized & overtly false narrative of reality to be the only one many people could trust. As much as we deride him, he now owns license to what is “real” in America.

"Deluge of the real" was a durational performance that took place over the twelve "daylight" hours of President's Day, 2017. It consisted of twelve consecutive hours of publicly screened documentary footage, all of which analyzed the nuances of technology, ignorance and psychology in global politics. This "occupation of president's day" was curated in an attempt to chart the erosions of “truth” and “trust” in politics that led to Trump’s election. Best of all: they offered a window into how Donald Trump makes sense.